The Emoji Movie Review

I found a meme that describes today’s animation movies. It says that during 1995, movie makers gave feelings to toys by creating The Toy Story. During 1998, they provided feelings to bugs through A Bug’s Life. In 2001 and 2003, they presented monsters and fishes with feelings through Monsters, Inc and Finding Nemo respectively. They showed superheroes with feelings in the 2004 film, The Incredibles. In the 2006 film, Cars, and 2007 film, Ratatouille, they gave feelings to cars and rats respectively. During 2008, robots had feelings in Wall-E and during 2009, dogs had feelings in Up. In 2012, they provided feelings to Scotland in Brave. And in 2015, feelings also had feelings in Inside Out!

And the list does not end there because this year, emojis came to life! The Emoji Movie showed us the world inside our phones and how the emojis live and do their job there. But the focus of the story is on Gene, an emoji who makes multiple expressions. Because of this, Smiler, the leader of the text center, said that he must be deleted because he is a malfunction. So Gene, together with High-Five and Jailbreak, finds the hacker so he can be fixed. Basically, The Emoji Movie tells us about how Gene saved himself from the bots and how he saved the phone of his user, Alex.

I actually have no issues to movie makers who always give feelings to every object they think as long as they also give them a beautiful story. But honestly, they don’t. I get the point of the story but its flow and organization is totally confusing. It may not be predictable but it’s not surprising as well. The element of wonder wasn’t there and it lacks revelations and twists.

I admit that I enjoyed the adventure of Gene, High-Five and Jailbreak to Drop Box. I was anticipated to find out what’s inside each application like Facebook, Instagram, Youtube and Spotify. But the movie only satisfied my anticipation when the three entered Candy Crush, wherein they paired candies of similar colors to save Gene, and Just Dance, wherein they danced to escape from bots. In their encounter with other apps, I hate to say the word but it was boring. The creators of this flick target everybody regardless of the age but as I see it, the plot and the animation are only intended for kids who just want to be entertained and somehow learn.

© Sony Pictures